Lady Luck Sportsbook Review
Located on the grounds of Farmington, PA’s 5-star Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, the Lady Luck Casino hotel offers 320 luxurious rooms and suites, as well as access to a slew of casino and entertainment amusements. Situated in southwest Pennsylvania, the Lady Luck Nemacolin is primed to offer one of the area’s first sports betting services. As such, the Lady Luck sportsbook review – once its services go live – is bound to offer up the goods on one of the area’s very best sports wagering experiences.
Due to its close proximity to Pittsburg, once the Lady Luck sportsbook is actually up and running, you can expect a huge home-team presence to skew certain NFL, MLB, and NHL lines to reflect the overwhelming action the Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins are going to attract. We want to give you all of the latest updates in our review of the Lady Luck Sportsbook, as well as details on the overall landscape of legal sports betting in Pennsylvania.
One piece of advice is that if you hope to avoid paying extra vigorish (aka house take) on your favorite local teams at the Lady Luck sportsbook, you might want to check out a few of the top-quality offshore betting shops that serve the area. Sites like Bovada, BetOnline, 5Dimes, BetDSI, and SportsBetting have all been serving PA residents for decades, and their lines show no home-team biases, so you’ll always be able to shop around online for the best betting value on Pennsylvania’s most popular sports clubs.
Additionally, these offshore books represent the only way that PA residents can currently wager on sports over the Internet, which remains the most convenient and cost-effective way to bet on sports in the state. As always, using these online sportsbooks is 100% legal, totally secure, and a whole lot of fun. That being said, we can jump right into our Lady Luck Sportsbook review.
Currently, the Lady Luck sportsbook is not open for business, as Pennsylvania state law (Act 42) requires all prospective sportsbook venues to pay a one-time $10 million fee in order to have their applications processed and approved with the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. This requirement of the PGCB is causing area casinos and racetracks to delay their applications for sports betting licenses, and the required 36% taxation rate on sportsbook revenues – the highest such tax in the entire world – isn’t helping spur these companies along, either.
That said, the Lady Luck sportsbook might be on the horizon regardless of such fees and tax structures, primarily because the venue’s owner, Eldorado Resorts, has a number of other casino operations throughout the US. This means that PA’s high cost of entry could be mitigated by the revenue streams of Eldorado’s other properties, making the $10 million startup fee and high tax rate more palatable in the long run.
Additionally, Eldorado has the benefit of having bookmaking experience at many of its other properties, which means that – as soon as the Lady Luck Casino sportsbook goes live – it should offer a world-class betting experience to all PA residents and visitors.
Once the Lady Luck sports betting lounge is open to the public, it will assuredly offer a comprehensive wagering menu on both national and international sporting events. The Lady Luck sportsbook will have to have full-service betting to remain competitive, and it will.
PA sports bettors will be able to put money on action from all the games of the major US sports leagues to international soccer, cricket, rugby, boxing, golf, tennis, and other competitive contests. The Lady Luck sportsbook will also offer a complete selection of wager types, from common point spreads, totals, and straight moneyline bets to futures, props, specials, parlays, and more. Without a doubt, if it’s a sport and you can bet on it, the Lady Luck sportsbook will have it.
Pennsylvania law explicitly allows Internet-based sports betting at Pennsylvania sportsbooks, and the PGCB is gearing up to approve such websites once PA-area casinos and racetracks finally open their on-site sportsbooks. However, any online betting that comes to the state will likely take a bit longer to get off the ground, with the critical consensus pegging the start date for such services at around the end of 2018 at the earliest. Once Internet betting is live, of course, you will be able to place bets at Lady Luck sportsbook on your mobile device of choice, simply by utilizing your iPhone, iPad, or Android browser.
As far as a Lady Luck sportsbook app is concerned, dedicated native smartphone and tablet apps are probably on the immediate horizon. However, since official apps require approval by Apple and Google before they can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play, there’s a good chance that such a product’s release date will creep into 2019. Still, in the meantime, you can use your mobile right now to wager on your favorite Pennsylvania teams at the aforementioned legal offshore sportsbooks.
Proxy betting is most likely not in the cards for those who want to bet at Lady Luck Sportsbook. Being that proxy betting usually means that someone out of state has made an arrangement with someone in-state to place bets on their behalf, most states consider the practice illegal. This is because there is no way to verify the age and identity of the person who enlisted the proxy. Even when using mobile sportsbooks, there are steps that operators take to ensure that bettors are of age and in a gambling-friendly location.
In other words, sports bettors in PA will literally have to be physically inside the state to wager online at the Lady Luck Casino in Nemacolin. Gamblers who use online sports betting sites, however, can bet on their favorite sports from virtually anywhere. Bovada, BetOnline, and other online sportsbooks allow bets to be placed while you are home, at a restaurant, on vacation, etc. If the general rules for proxy betting change in the future, we will update our review of the Lady Luck Sportsbook.
